Last week our friends at CircleCI showed us how to securely run cross-browser front-end tests on the Sauce Labs cloud using their hosted Continuous Integration service. We’ve long been advocates of good continuous integration practices and have developed a few plugins for some of the more common CI servers out there. We’re super excited to add CircleCI to our list and even more excited about how easy it is to get it going! Continuous Integration in the Cloud Continuous Integration, if you don’t already know, is the process of building your app frequently from a shared source code repository and running tests to make sure everything works. If your tests don’t pass and the build is not successful, the code that was checked in since the last good build is where the defects were introduced, and so problems are much easier to find and fix quickly. Maintaining a local CI server can be a hassle. Anyone who’s spent any considerable time configuring Jenkins jobs with all it’s various plugins and tasks can tell you all about it. CircleCI, on the other hand, integrates directly with GitHub and can actually *infer* necessary settings directly from your code (if you’re following good development practices for that language and environment) and so many projects just magically build themselves on CircleCI without any additional configuration on your part. It’s like three clicks from zero to CI. Pretty sweet! If you do need to tweak or customize any settings, you can easily do so by describing those settings in a circle.yml file placed in your repo. Running Tests on Sauce Labs Browsers Sauce Labs is the world’s largest cross-browser client cloud. We host over 375 different configurations of operating systems and browsers so you can ensure that your app works on all the specific platforms and versions you need to support. These days that’s an ever-growing list! So it makes sense to run these tests with your continuous integration process so you know things work across the board and you don’t end up spending a bunch of time and trouble trying to hunt down bugs that were introduced much earlier in the development cycle. Now, if your build deploys your code to a publicly accessible environment, CircleCI will simply execute your Selenium tests and you probably won’t need to configure anything, since Sauce Labs browsers will be able connect to that environment over the public network. However, if you want CircleCI to execute your tests locally in it’s build containers, you’ll need to use Sauce Connect. Sauce Connect is a secure tunneling utility which allows you to execute tests behind firewalls via an encrypted connection between Sauce Labs and your testing environment. When you run Sauce Connect yourself, you typically do it from a command line or shell script and supply your Sauce Labs account credentials as parameters. With a CircleCI build, you’ll need to set it up in the circle.yml file so it can be launched as part of the build process and those tests can run inside the local container. All that’s really involved here is telling the build task where to find Sauce Connect and how to start it up with your account credentials. The first part is downloading and unpacking the Sauce Connect file, which you add as a custom dependency entry in your circle.yml:
dependencies:
post:
- wget https://saucelabs.com/downloads/sc-latest-linux.tar.gz
- tar -xzf sc-latest-linux.tar.gz
The second part is to add your credentials, launch the tunnel, and check that it’s running before kicking off the tests. You’ll put these lines in the `test` section of circle.yml:
test:
override:
- ./bin/sc -u $SAUCE_USERNAME -k $SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY -f ~/sc_ready:
background: true
pwd: sc-*-linux
# Wait for tunnel to be ready
- while [ ! -e ~/sc_ready ]; do sleep 1; done
That’s all there is to it. You can find out the details here and see a full example on GitHub. And CircleCI has a nice little utility to help you add your credentials as environment variables so that they are not visible as plain text in the repo. With CircleCI tackling all the necessary work involved in supporting your continuous integration process and Sauce Labs hosting the world’s most extensive cross-browser client cloud, you can be free of the costs and hassles of managing all these systems and grids and get back to focusing on the business of making great software. - Michael Sage, Principal Technology Evanglist, Sauce Labs Michael Sage is a Principal Technology Evangelist at Sauce Labs. He helps software teams develop, deliver, and care for great apps. He’s lived through two or three technology revolutions and expects a few more to come, and finds the prospect incredibly exciting. A native of Philadelphia, he’s made San Francisco his home for over 25 years, but still can’t find a good hoagie there.
